The Price of the Ticket Read online

  Until Martin Seam sagged headlong toward the light switch and over his little ironing board with a sigh, bearing finally less resemblance to his acquisitive self than to, say, a rain-struck fallen maypole, all its many ribbons drenched and tangled in ruin.

  The fabulous amount of cocaine he’d recently ingested enabled him to silently experience many transitional sensations for far longer a time than he might otherwise have done.

  You sure you don’t want another grasshopper?

  Chapter Fifteen

  HORSEKNOCKER UNLOCKED THE DOOR AND PUSHED IT OPEN. Whether or not somebody had straightened up after the cops, he expected to find a mess. Sentimental or otherwise.

  He dropped a week’s worth of mail on the first chair he came to. The apartment looked straight enough, but the sight of it annoyed and saddened him. Horse had lost a friend and a meal ticket in Pauley, not to mention a guy who owned a dictionary, and there was nothing he could do about it. Celeste was in jail for murder, and there was little more than nothing to be done about that. Celeste’s snakes and spiders were hungry and alone, though, and there, alas, was something he could do: he could feed her snakes for her.

  He could talk to them, too, if he liked. Just so long as he put a good face on his chatter, as if she were merely out of town temporarily, on business. Don’t want to depress the reptiles.

  A childhood in Philadelphia had exposed Horseknocker to a greater quantity of dildos and bullwhips than he would ever see of snakes, and he looked forward to keeping it that way; but an hour in Celeste’s domain always adjusted that ratio downwards.

  Other friends had assessed the situation and decided to stage a garage-sale, auction, pot-luck buffet, dance and mumble-de-peg tournament to get together some money for bail, a lawyer and a cremation. Dave was going to open The Gyre early and officiate at the raffle. Then his bartenders were going to host the garage sale. After that came a pot-luck lunch and the auction of Pauley’s tools. Booze served all day and a good thing, Horse wasn’t sure he could otherwise tolerate the proceedings. Yet, nor could he bring himself to skip them. He wasn’t too big on emotions, but once in a while emotions got too big on him. All proceeds from the events and the bar to go into a kitty, and the first bill to hit the bottom of that kitty was the twenty that Pauley had traded to Horseknocker. Jingles chipped in a book of food stamps. Max got sober and threw the Chevy truck on the block for $600, as a reminder of how cheaply a man could get himself killed. Dave paid the six hundred and turned ownership of the truck into a raffle item. Twenty-five dollars got you two beers and three shots: two of whiskey and the other at owning a perfectly good Chevy truck. No limit on number of tickets purchased. The winner got to go down to City Hall and try to hassle the cops into giving him the key to the truck out of Pauley’s effects, if he wanted to. Max had another key if he didn’t. The kitty had taken in about fourteen hundred dollars as of yesterday, Thursday morning.

  It was touching, that fourteen hundred dollars. Horse wondered how much of it Pauley might have been able to raise if he’d just walked into The Gyre and announced he was ruined. Some of it, maybe. But the muteness of death speaks louder than a live protestation. Something there was, too, about Pauley’s particular death, that made grown men reach for their wallets, thinking, There, but for buying a used truck, expired I.

  Anyhow, Pauley had never appreciated charity.

  And anyhow anyhow, Pauley didn’t need that kind of help anymore. The idea now was to help Celeste. The district attorney wanted to start the bidding at murder one but that bluster wasn’t going to last. Any decent lawyer would counter with manslaughter in self-defense, and the district attorney would cut a very square deal for a plea before he’d let the case get in front of a jury. After all, the girl had found her lover murdered, and, having every reason to expect the same for herself, she carved up his murderer in self-defense. An open and shut case. Premeditation? No way. So what if she was packing a razor? She was venturing into the neighborhood with the highest rape statistics in the City. Why should a girl rely on a rape-whistle when she owns a razor? Besides, that Seam guy was packing a weapon, too.

  Seam was packing a flat iron.

  Horseknocker shook his head.

  A flat iron.

  No priors, a good lawyer, a dress that revealed a little skin while covering all the tattoos, sans nose bone–Celeste was pretty certain to cop probation and walk free.

  Unlike Pauley. Unless that is you considered death the Big Parole.

  At least she’d been able to nail the creep that killed him.

  The Chronicle made a big deal about the double murder, at first. Because of the address and the lateness of the hour the night editor hastily assumed it was some kind of society cutup and played it big in the morning edition. By Monday a few facts had thrown cold water on the story; and of course, if the night editor had thought the participants Hispanic, Black, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, gay or anything but rich white heterosexuals, if the murder had taken place in the Tenderloin or Hunters Point or the Mission or San Bruno, anywhere but in Pacific Heights, he’d have played the story once next to the obituaries and let it sink without a trace. Which might have been a better deal for Celeste. Her looks made a pretty good picture in the Saturday paper. A clipping was on the wall in The Gyre. But as a result Celeste had the added annoyance of having to sit in her cell and take on all kinds of weirdos with all kinds of programs. One woman appeared at the city jail an hour after the paper hit the street at three A.M., claiming she was Celeste’s mother and trying to bail her out with an automatic teller card issued by a Savings and Loan that no longer existed. It took two days for her to lose interest and go away. A cop told Horse the woman was completely mad, what he called a regular, who took the bus down from Sacramento several days a week just to interact with city bureaucrats.

  The same cop asked Horseknocker what kind of broad wears a glow-in-the-dark bone in her nose. Although he’d never noticed that particular bone in Celeste’s nose before, Horse assured the cop that Celeste was a nice girl, and suggested maybe a day-glo nose-bone helped a girl’s self-esteem. “Not day-glo exactly,” corrected the officer, “check it out.” Out of the envelope containing Celeste’s personal effects, from which Horse had gained permission to retrieve the apartment key, the cop pulled an inch-long plastic filament. “It’s green,” he pointed out. “See? Now, watch close.” It was tapered at each end and green, Horseknocker could see. The officer pinched the pale sliver between his thumb and forefinger, and the bone’s color gradually elided from pale green through blue to bright orange. He held it up. “It’s a goddamn mood-bone,” he said, unable to suppress entirely the awe in his jaded voice. “Like them rings they used to make. The Sarge, he’s got the high blood pressure? He can make it go rosey red.” He dropped the mood-bone on his desk and they passed a minute watching the strange substance cool to green again. “Self-esteem, huh?” the cop said. Horseknocker shrugged. “How come you took it off her in the first place?” “Might tunnel out with it,” the cop said, “or commit suicide.” Horseknocker nodded. The cop added, not unkindly, “No jewelry allowed in the lockup. They find enough to fight over as it is. Besides, with all them tattoos, she’s cute enough already. Not to worry. The girls respect that she cut up that guy for killing her old man, so they’re all rooting for her. Only real problem back there is this bulldagger trusty calls herself Choke Cherry.” “Pardon?” “Choke Cherry.” “What about her?” “She’s taken a shine to your friend. Renamed her ‘Future Honey’.” “I swear,” Horseknocker croaked, “she’s a good girl.” “Then you better get her out of here.” The cop flicked the mood-bone back into the manila property envelope and filed it away. When he closed the deep metal drawer it sounded like the door on a subway train.

  Alternately, some twenty-five year old stockbroker-type was telling anybody around the jail who would listen that Celeste had recently cleaned him for $1500 in cash by threatening to castrate him “with that exact same razor.” When asked why he hadn’t come
forward earlier, he said he had been disoriented and uncertain about his rights. Plus he’d known she was dangerous and though he had recognized it as just a matter of time before she really hurt somebody, he was afraid of her. “You should be,” a listening cop observed sympathetically. Moreover, the guy continued, stuttering, he was well aware of the weak position a solid citizen was putting himself into, coming forward without er uh proof, “Ask anybody,” etc. etc. Like the lady from Sacramento he, too, was ignored. The policy was to make sure such people were unarmed, then allow him or her to wander the corridors of the courthouse until they ran into somebody who was crazier than they were, which usually resulted in their taking their agenda elsewhere. Horseknocker made it a point to stay away from jailhouses, but it seemed to him there were a great many more crazy people down there than in former years, when he himself had been working out a predilection to be spending more time in custody than was good for him.

  The apartment looked much as always, not clinically hygienic, but comfortable and neat. Pauley had received lots of training in neatness. He’d kept his torture rack shop the same way. At any rate, it seemed that the cops had managed to conduct their search without trashing the place.

  The television was still on, with the sound off. The tarantula hadn’t starved to death, although it seemed to be moving very slowly. Celeste had told him that so long as the television was on, Lieutenant Uhura was perfectly happy not to eat. While contradicting the behavior of most TV addicts he knew, this was okay with Horseknocker, who thought it was pretty silly to keep spiders around the house, let alone to feed them. But there was enough weird stuff here and there in cages to make him wonder if the tarantula wasn’t being kept around to feed to something else. There was a snake, for example, and a scorpion the size of a hair brush, who lived in individual glass boxes flanking the answering machine.

  Unlike the snake, the answering machine was blinking.

  The apartment retained the rank snake-house odor unique to the homes of people who keep reptiles and spiders as pets. Pauley hadn’t given a damn about all these creatures, it was Celeste who liked them. When asked about the smell Pauley would just shrug and observe that anything smelled better than a prison, except maybe the homes of people who kept cats.

  Horseknocker looked from one glass cage to the next. Snake, scorpion, spider. Things must have been pretty jolly in this apartment after the ’89 earthquake.

  Though herself in a tight place, Celeste was worried about her animals. She was in touch with a girlfriend who was going to get in touch with Horseknocker next week. If he would let her into the apartment and help her remove all the animals to Oakland, where they would live until Celeste could make bail, all Horseknocker had to do was feed the creatures just this once. As an afterthought Celeste had looked Horseknocker up and down and added, “You might like Camille, Horse. You’ve got the kind of build she likes on a man.”

  Horse paused before a mirror on the back of a door and cradled his belly. There were no mirrors in his van, and as The Gyre had no mirrors either, especially not in the bathrooms, where they would interfere with the twinned arts of wall-writing and wall-punching, Horse rarely saw his reflection outside of store windows, and was often surprised when he did. He hadn’t weighed himself in at least ten years, but, although only five foot ten inches, Horse weighed at least 225 pounds. He was naturally strong, running to fat, a beer-gutted man who occasionally shaved his skull. He disliked tattoos, piercing, animals that crawled or creeped, and the people who cultivated such things, excepting Celeste. He reflexively told people what he thought of them whether he knew them or not, and was counter-suggestive to the point of keeping himself alive because five or six years ago a woman had suggested he save the rest of the women of the world a lot of trouble by taking a dive off a bridge. Thus, out of spite, Horseknocker lived.

  He regarded himself in the mirror. The assessment? He should get a job. He sucked in his gut and puffed out his chest. The assessment? Entire countries feared him. He exhaled and his stomach sagged to its natural cargo-hold disposition. Come and get it, Camille.

  The reflected paper sack in his reflected hand reminded him of his first and least pleasant duty: Feed them snakes.

  The snake called Mr. Sulu was easy. All Horse had to do was raise the lid of its cage and drop in a mouse. The guy in the mouse store had showed Horse how to dangle it by its tail. Perhaps to emphasize its benignity, the mouse was white.

  Horseknocker dropped it in.

  The mouse took two minutes to familiarize itself with the fact that it couldn’t climb about ten inches of vertical glass walls forming the corner farthest away from the snake, and thence penetrate the lid. It demonstrated this several times for a certainty by springing straight up and crashing its little head against the glass roof. Then it froze in terror. The snake lay beyond a patch of vermiculite like a pile of tarred rope, on top of a petrified saguaro branch, and flicked its tongue in apparent gustation. Otherwise it didn’t move at all. It just stared. Horse had heard snakes didn’t have eyelids, and this one certainly didn’t blink–but, big deal, he’d known a kid in Philly that was born with four eyelids.

  Celeste had said the feeding would take awhile and was “really interesting” to watch.

  Uh-huh.

  The second snake was the tricky one. This was Scotty the python, who lived in a closet called the “Engine Room.” Since Pauley refused to allow Celeste’s or his own clothes to stink of snake like everything else in the apartment, Scotty had the Engine Room more or less to himself. Celeste told Horse that Scotty liked to drape himself from the closet dowel or hang around on the shelf above it or both, since he was “a pretty big guy.” But as there was no way to be certain exactly where Scotty might be at any particular time, Horse would have to be careful about opening the door. The problem wasn’t that Scotty would try to escape–far from it. The problem was that, as with all such pythons, Scotty was only fed about every ten days. The rest of the time he lay around dozing and digesting, practically in hibernation. The seventh or eighth day after eating he would show signs of life. The ninth or tenth day he would begin to take an active interest in finding something to eat and begin to hunt, just as if he were in the jungle or under a building or wherever in hell he was supposed to be spending his life instead of inside a stinking dark closet. After eleven or twelve days a python begins to get very hungry and congruently belligerent about finding something to eat. Celeste had forgotten to feed Scotty oh, she counted on her fingers, the week before Pauley.… Maybe two weeks before Pauley.… She started to cry.

  A little later Celeste pulled herself together enough to say she really appreciated Horse’s feeding Scotty. Just one mouse would do fine until Camille showed up. Camille would take it from there. Be sure to meet her.

  It seemed possible that Scotty hadn’t eaten in sixteen, maybe seventeen days.

  Sure enough, the closet had a brass plate screwed to its door. Like you’d see on a ship, the plate read “Engine Room.”

  Horse pulled the second mouse out of the bag by its tail and held it at arm’s length as he approached the closet. Whereas the first one had gone bravely to meet its fate, the second mouse resisted, squeaking and twisting, and scratched at Horseknocker’s thumb with little claws. The mouse had to be alive, Celeste had insisted on that point. No self-respecting snake would touch a mouse it hadn’t itself killed. It was like a built-in kosher thing. As he turned the knob on the Engine Room door Horse was not happy with Camille for talking the cops out of calling the SPCA, which they usually did in such cases. Why not let the prevention of cruelty take its course for a change?

  The latch wasn’t clear of its strike before something hit the inside of the door with a bang that sounded like a hammer. The door jumped outward and hit Horse in the side of the head, and the knob jammed his thumb. He closed his eyes and yelped. In a fit of self-preservation he attempted to kick the door shut and simultaneously threw his shoulder against it, but something prevented the door from closing
. After the slightest pause that something began to thrash against the back of the door. He heard a harsh cough, and a warm, evil odor assailed his nostrils.

  His eyes squeezed shut against the pain in the side of his head he persevered, holding on to the mouse’s tail with one hand and the doorknob with the other, while the stile battered his shoulder. There must be some kind of mistake, he thought. There has to be a man trapped in this closet. He’s throwing his entire weight against this door trying to get out.

  He didn’t want to open his eyes, but the thought occurred to him that if he didn’t open them soon he might never open them again.

  So he opened his eyes. About three inches from his nose gaped the jaws of the biggest snake he’d ever seen. The creature’s maw looked liked a tunnel to hell and was as pink as the inside of a ballpark frank.

  The snake’s head and about six inches of its neck were trapped between the door and the jamb. He could easily have gotten his balled fist into the snake’s mouth, and the six inches of neck that Horse could see were as big around as his own forearm. That meant there must be two or three yards and maybe a hundred pounds of snake beyond the panels of the door. Its thrashing sounded like twenty kids playing tag up and down a wooden staircase.